Family
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Titles in the Family Theme:
"The Stone Boy" by Gina Berriault
During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase
"The Five-Forty-Eight" by John Cheever
This House of Sky by Ivan Doig
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories edited by James Moffett and Kenneth McElheny
"A & P" by John Updike
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
During the Reign of the Queen of Persia (1983) is a novel of sisters, mothers, and daughters and–not least–their men, who can never compete with the fierce bonds that link the Ohio farm women and the Krauss family. Chase’s ability to give us memorable characters who revolve around their reigning "Queen of Persia," old Gram, is partly the result of her unique point of view: the "we" of four young cousins who speak as one. In the midst of family feuds, divided loyalties, awakening (and souring) sexuality, and deadly illness, Chase does not allow emotions to say into sentimentality or tragedy. A tart and rowdy humor presides over a book about survival through love (American Library Association, 1984).
This House of Sky (1978) is a tale of growing up once-upon-a-time-in-the-West. It is also a tribute to a dying way of life, and a success story of breaking away from one’s past only to realize that, if one has a past like this, it is worth cherishing and chronicling. This House of Sky begins with the death of Doig’s mother at 31, when the author was only six. From that day on, Ivan and his father, Charlie, become inseparable partners and unique friends. The failure of Charlie’s second marriage brings them even closer. Yong Ivan feels "as though I was already grown and raised" with "an awareness that I was being counted special by being allowed into this blazing grownup worlds" of saloons and high adventure on the range. There are few children in the small Montana town, and Ivan must "board out" with other families to attend school in the winter, while his father works the high country. To stabilize their small family, Charlie summons Bessie Ringer, Ivan’s maternal grandmother. Much of the book is taken up with the forging of this remarkable trinity, as Lady and Charlie grudgingly bury their differences in their greater love for Ivan (American Library Association, 1984).
Ordinary People (1976) written by Judith Guest portrays with psychological accuracy a family tragedy–the death of a son. It moves us because the unexpected death of a young person is a special loss, bringing with it guilt for those left behind. The three remaining Jarretts of Lake Forest, Illinois, try to cope with what they were and will become. These "ordinary people" are the epitome of the American success ethic: the father, Calvin, a self-made attorney; Beth, the beautiful wife, envied for her perfect house, her bridge and tennis games; and their son, Conrad, the overachiever (American Library Association, 1984).
A Raisin in the Sun (1966) tells the story of a family that lives in a Chicago ghetto but is at a moment when "freedom" seems near. A widow, Mama Younger receives a $10,000 check from the life insurance policy of her dead husband. The money, which would be worth three times as much today, is the catalyst that brings on the family’s social revolution and internal evolution. Mama can buy a house in a white neighborhood, but can the family handle an uncertain future of white hostility? She can give her son money for his business venture, but can she trust him to invest wisely? Strong-minded but compassionate, Mama realizes she can only influence her children by her dignity and embracing love. The play presents us with an old-fashioned test of character for each family member and has rightly been lauded for its humor and its fairness in its treatment of explosive racial issues (American Library Association, 1984).
Book Reviews and Information on Lorraine Hansberry
Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories edited by James Moffett and Kenneth R. McElheny (1966)
"The Stone Boy" written by Gina Berriault recounts a tale of two young brothers, Arnold and Eugie, involved in a shooting accident while they are picking peas for their mother. After his rifle discharges, killing Eugie, Arnold continues to gather peas, then returns home to announce calmly, "Eugie’s dead." The reader is left to judge the boy, the consequences of his actions, and his choice to withhold his feelings from his parents. We see there will be no psychiatrist, as in Ordinary People, to help Arnold and his family to communicate. No one knows how to share Arnold’s grief, and the story offers no signposts, other than everyday chores which need to be done, life which must continue (American Library Association,1984).
"The Five-Forty-Eight" (1954) tells the story of Blake, a middle-aged man, on his suburban train to disquietude. He is being pursued by a Miss Dent, whom he knows. Afraid, he’s sure that she plans violence, yet he tells us he’s an "insignificant man" whose briefcase holds no secrets. Gradually we learn he does have secrets, as he muses upon his loveless marriage, his adultery, his unhappy children. The latent danger he fears appears at last to take revenge on his mean spirit, and we ponder Miss Dent’s surprising choice of action. In the last scene, she renders a lesson to one who exploits others. But will the incident make a difference in Blake’s behavior? (American Library Association, 1984).
"A & P" depicts a rite of passage as 19-year-old Sammy tells of a crisis in his job as cashier at the A & P. Because of a decision by the self-righteous manager to banish three scantily clad girls from the store, Sammy, in one grand gesture, resigns. No one cares. Sammy rejects the ugliness of the A & P, but with humor and irony, Updike shows the dangers of idealism. Though his family is not present in the story, Sammy realizes he will have to account to them for his behavior. The girls trigger an action that is irreversible, leaving Sammy with the painful knowledge of "how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter" (American Library Association, 1984).
The Glass Menagerie (1945) is a play where Tom Wingfield remembers a decisive moment in the life of his family. The time is the Depression, the place St. Louis, and the family is shabbily genteel and fatherless. His shy sister, Laura, is not only physically but also psychologically disabled; she collects glass figurines, which symbolize her own emotional fragility. Their mother, Amanda, is a frayed southern belle, who hopes to teach her daughter how to use "charm" to get a man. Tom is a frustrated poet who works in a warehouse, escaping to the movies when reality comes too near (American Library Association, 1984).
Book Reviews and Information on Tennessee Williams
Family - Cheever
Information on John Cheever
"The loss of his father’s job in 1930, followed by the loss of the family home and the strained marital situation, caused, Cheever believed, by his mother’s growing financial and emotional dependence, all had a lifelong effect on Cheever. When he was seventeen, he was already committed to a writing career. His career, however, would do little to assuage his sense of emotional and economic insecurity. Although he liked to claim that ‘fiction is not crypto-autobiography,’ from the beginning his stories were drawn from his personal experiences. They have even followed him geographically: from New England to New York City through his military service to the suburbs, with side trips to Italy, the Soviet Union, and Sing Sing prison, where he taught writing. The stories have more importantly followed Cheever over hazardous emotional terrain, transforming personal obsessions into published fictions: alcoholism, bisexuality, self-doubts, strained marital relations, and the sense of ‘otherness.’ The stories also evidence the longing for stability and home that manifested itself in three of the most enduring relationships of his fifty-year career. Cheever did not become free of his various fears and dependencies–including his nearly suicidal addiction to alcohol– until the mid-1970's. After undergoing treatment for alcoholism at Smithers Rehabilitation Center, he transformed what might well have become his darkest novel into his most affirmative. Falconer (1977) was both a critical and a commercial success. Like its main character, Cheever seemed for the first time in his life free, willing at least to begin talking about the private life that he had so successfully guarded, even mythified before, when he had played the part of country squire. The triumph was, however, short-lived: two neurological seizures in 1980, a kidney operation and the discovery of cancer in 1981, and, shortly after the publication of his fifth novel, the aptly and perhaps whimsically titled Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982), his death on June 18, 1982. (American Diversity, American Identity: The Lives and Works of 145 Writers Who Define the American Experience, 1995)
Family - Doig
Information on Ivan Doig
Ivan Doig was born on June 27, 1938 in White Sulphur Springs, Montana. He was the son of Charles Campbell and Berneta (Ringer) Doig. On April 17, 1965, Ivan Doig married Carol Muller. Doig now lives in Seattle, Washington. Doig has integrated his knowledge of this area of the United States into a number of well-known books, including the memoir This House of Sky; Landscapes of a Western Mind, Winter Brothers: A Season on the Edge of America, and the 1996 novel Bucking the Sun, Heart Earth, English Creek, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and Ride With Me, Mariah Montana comprise Doig’s fictional trilogy, also taking place in the Northwest United States.
Internal conflict among members of the McCaskill family and the coming-of-age of its younger son in 1939 form the basis for the novel English Creek, the first part of Doig’s "McCaskill Family" trilogy. English Creek is anchored in the American West and resembles a 19th Century European novel. In the novel, Doig struggles with issue of character and morality.
"I am Montana-born and now live within half a mile of Puget Sound," Doig once told Contemporary Authors. "Inevitably or so it seems to me, my books are the result of those popular pulls of the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific. Whichever the setting, in both my fiction and nonfiction I try to work two stubborn substances, research and craft, into becoming the hardest alloy of all– a good story. And that to me is the ultimate ‘region,’ the true home, for a writer. Specific geographies, but galaxies of imaginative expression–we’ve seen them both exist in William Faulkner’s postage-stamp size Yoknapatawpha County, and in Gabreil Garcia-Marquez’ nowhere village of Macondo dreaming in its hundred years of solitude. It is my utter belief that writers of caliber can ground their work in specific land and lingo and yet be writing of that larger country: life."
Excerpts from Contemporary Authors. Gale Research 1999.
Family - Hansberry
Information on Lorraine Hansberry
This website provides a brief biography of Hansberry with additional links to more information. http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/corhans.htm
This research reference guide provides essays and study questions about Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun. It also contains information about Hansberry and a bibliography of her works. http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap8/hansberry.html
See a picture of Hansberry. http://www.mtsu.edu/~dlavery/hansberry.JPG
Book Reviews of A Raisin in the Sun
This site provides a message board for discussions about the play. It also links to eleven analysis essays about characters, style, and much more. http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~daniel/amlit/scenes.html
This website contains the complete dialogue from A Raisin in the Sun. It allows you to search the dialogue by wordlist (alphabetically or frequency-ordered.) It also gives research contacts to find out more information. http://www.public.iastate.edu/~spires/Concord/raisin.html
Family - Updike
Information on John Updike
This website gives a short biography of Updike and features one of his stories. http://www.usfca.edu/fac-staff/southerr/onupdike.html
This extensive site gives questions and commentary about Updike, a monthly Updike reader discussion, information and resources, a brief biography and literary chronology, a bibliography, lecture and appearance schedule, awards and honors, and essays and criticism. The page is maintained by James Yerkes, Ph.D., Professor of Religion and Philosophy, Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA. http://userpages.prexar.com/joyerkes/
Family - Williams
Information on Tennessee Williams
The following website is a lengthy dissertation about Williams entitled, "Certain Moral Values: A Rhetoric of Outcasts in the Play of Tennessee Williams." The dissertation was written by Darryl Erwin Haley of the University of Alabama Graduate School. http://www.etsu.edu/haleyd/DissHome.html
Book Reviews of The Glass Menagerie
The Glass Menagerie opens on a near-slum apartment, with Tom Wingfield setting the time (the Depression and Spanish-Civil-War 1930's). Tom works in a shoe warehouse, writes poetry, and feels imprisoned by the knowledge that his hateful job is essential of the family’s financial survival. His relationship with his mother is a combination of love, admiration, frustration, and acrimony, with regular flare-ups and reconciliations. His relationship with his sister is one of love and sympathy. Laura is physically crippled as well as with drawn from the outside world. She is psychologically unable to attend business college and lives in a world of her phonographs records and fragile glass animals. Amanda, a more complex character than the others, is the heart of the play: a constantly chattering woman who lives in part for her memories, perhaps exaggerated, of an idealized antebellum Southern girlhood and under the almost certain illusion that her son will amount to something and that her daughter will marry. Yet she also lives very positively in the real world, aware of the family’s poverty, keeping track of the bills, scratching for money by selling magazine subscriptions. Amanda must accept the fact that a job for Laura is out of the question, and she therefore starts planning for the other alternative, marriage. Scene 1 introduces a second symbol (the menagerie being the first) in a nickname that Laura says a boy gave her in high school: "Blue Roses." Roses are delicate and beautiful, like Laura and like her glass menagerie, but blue roses, like glass animals, have no real existence.
At Amanda’s urging, Tom invites Jim O’ Connor, a friend from the warehouse, home to dinner, in the hope that the "gentleman caller" will be attracted to Laura. Scene 6 shows the arrival of the guest and his attempt to accept Amanda’s pathetic and almost comical Southern-belle behavior and elaborate "fussing" and Laura’s almost pathological fright and consequent inability to come to the dinner table. By Amanda’s inevitable machinations after dinner, Jim and Laura are left alone. Jim-who has turned out to be the "Blue Roses" boy from high school, the boy with whom Laura was close to being in love–is sympathetic and understanding person who, even in the short time they are alone together, manages to get more spontaneous and revealing conversation out of Laura than her family ever has and even persuades her to dance. Clearly, here is a person who could bring to reality Amanda’s seemingly impossible dreams, a man who could lead Laura into the real world (as he symbolically brought her glass unicorn into it by unintentionally breaking off its horn), a man who would make a good husband. Later, however, Jim tells Laura that he is already engaged, and Laura’s life is permanently in ruins. What might have happened will never happen. When Amanda learns the truth from Jim just before he leaves, the resulting quarrel with Tom convinces Tom to leave home permanently, abandoning his mother and sister to an apparently hopeless situation. (Roth, John K. American Diversity, American Identity: The Lives and Works of 145 Writers Who Define the American Experience, Henry Holt & Company: New York, 1995.)